Lecture summary:
- To introduce historical conceptions of identity
- To intruduce Foucalt's 'discourse' methodology
- To place and critique contemporary practice within these frameworks, and to consider their validity.
Theories of identity
- Essentialism (traditional approach)
- Our biological makes us who we are.
Phrenology
Cesare Lombroso (1835) - (1909) - Fonder of positivist criminology - the notion that criminal tendencies are inherited.
Physiognomy
If we draw a line from the top of our head, through our nose and to our chin we can measure how intelligent we are. The more vertical the line - the more intelligent.
Legitimising racism.
Historical phases of identity
Douglas Kellner - Media culture: Cultural studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern and Post-modern, 1992
- Pre modern identity - personal identity is stable - defined
Looks of anxiety on their faces. Alienation is society, everyone is so consumed by themselves that they go inside themselves and seem anxious and scared.
Self-centred ways of dealing with our own existence
Foucalt - quite complex to read.
As things recur we can categorise and stereotype things/people
Do we take comfort from stereo types?
education and income - more recent discourses
Otherness - multiple options
Based around a history which was written by middle - upper class white european men
Analyse how the other people live. They are upperclass posh people.
Most important photographer working in the UK today.
people lying in the litter or in the shadow of a JCB.
The upper class will buy these photos - looking back and reflecting on how good they have it?
Documenting ascot.
Is it about lower classes being looked down on by the upper classes?
He sums up Germany in a sausage
Making a comment on what the english think of the Germans?
Draws on his Scottish heritage
The word rape - highly emotive
He gets attention to his work by using that word
Tartan - Stereotypically scottish
American identity
All these things that have come from elsewhere
Not a real identity
The first important black painter. Picked up by Andy Warhol.
Won the Turner Prize for this
Got people to write down what they were feeling on a sheet of paper with a marker pen
Volkwagan made an ad campaign around this
Mary magdelene the prostitute
Fashion industry is the work not of women but of men.
The image would have been shocking at the time with the legs on show
Gender being represented by fashion
Femininity - film stills
Stereotypes of women in film
Objectifying
Great breasts come from implants
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